A Spoon in the Road

IN OCTOBER 2010, just six days before my wife, Jackie, and I were scheduled to sign the lease for our first ice cream shop here in Brooklyn, I got a phone call from God. Well, it felt like God at the time.

It was a job offer from a major book publisher in New York. They wanted me to come in and oversee production of their audiobook line. You see, for eight years I’d been making a living (on and off, that is, and recently mostly off) producing and directing audiobooks, as well as writing the occasional half-man, half-gator monster movie. The last two years had been tough. Freelance work had dried up.